In collaboration with the Neuroimaging Laboratory at IRCCS, Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome (Head by Dr Emiliano Macaluso),  the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory team aim to explore normal brain functioning as well as structural/functional changes associated with neurological disorders. Current research projects revolve around social attention, empathy for pain, action observation and body representations in expert brains.
 
Social attention Phenomenology and neural basis of reflexive joint attention will be explored by using gaze-cuing and hand-cuing paradigms in which directional saccadic or hand movements of a model trigger attentional shifts in an onlooker (Crostella et al, 2009; Cazzato et al, In preparation). This approach is also used to explore complex social phenomena such as leadership and followership in healthy subjects and neurological damaged patients.

Empathy for pain Empathy, i.e. the ability to experience and understand another individual’s feelings. There is evidence to suggest that specific aspects of empathy may be based on ‘mirror-matching’ simulation of emotional, sensory and motor states of others’. Using fMRI and psychophysiological techniques, we will investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying empathic behaviour with particular reference to observation of pain in individuals who are perceived as similar or dissimilar by the onlooker (Azevedo et al, in preparation).

Action perception and anticipation in expert brains  Studies on  the relation between domain-specific observation and the capacity to attain high executive and strategic standards of performance are carried out. Action observation seems to activate specific motor-resonance mechanisms which are crucial for the optimal coupling of perceptuo-motor abilities.  We plan to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that allow to couple perception and action according to anticipatory codes and that may be crucial for achieving the sensorimotor excellence typical of expert brains (e.g. elite athletes, Abreu et al, in preparation; expert pianists; Pazzaglia et al, in preparation).